I see lots of mobile platforms like it was a hoard of web frameworks, but I think mine is the best.

I could give you a lots of reasons of why mine is the best, but for the sake of discussion lets say it is.

As such if you owned Android, Bada, J2ME, Brew, iOS, or the like before they were known how would you make money from one of them if no one knew about it and you had absolutely no money to market, advertise, or show it off.

Would you:

1. Continue on your own and ignore the platform marketplace all together? (This has been my main approach so far.)

2. Generate general interest in the platform with forum postings while opening it up? (This has been my secondary approach so far. I have pushed about 1/3 of the AllBinary Platform into GitHub without business partners, government stimulus, or the like.)

3. Try to approach large businesses to create partnerships?

4. Walk into banks and push a business proposals?

5. Open Source it all and write a book and teach it? (Would it matter if it was BSD, Apache, or low cost commercial license.)

6. Other?

My current plan is push new games and the AllBinary Platform for about 1 more year. I will make my last game alone next year that will be a 3D Multi-Platform MMORTS that I will add real robots to. After that I will probably just build a self replicating robot army and do my own thing if I can't find a way into the marketplace. So your input is important to me.

Don't make money off the platform. Make a really great game and then tell people you'll sell the license if they want to use it. It's too difficult to get some one to pay for a platform given how many great free open-source frameworks are out there.

Don't make money off the platform. Make a really great game and then tell people you'll sell the license if they want to use it. It's too difficult to get some one to pay for a platform given how many great free open-source frameworks are out there.

So, I wonder how much better I need. Feature wise I can only really add something like Kinect, AllBinary game console, real robots, or something. Unless you mean a better game as in more fun or a hit? Which means that the popularity of my platform has nothing to do with amazing features and only about a single popular game that could possibly be single platform and 2d technically crap game? Well?

I don't plan on making much money off of game development yet. It's just a hobby now, and I'd rather get as many people to use ferox as possible so that it can improve from use. That being said, I don't think anyone really does use it and I certainly don't keep a stable enough API yet for it...

+1 on the site - very poor effort, shows a general lack of care, commitment, or even understanding of how others might perceive you and your work. Hire a pro to sort that out and that's half your marketing battle won already.

Secondly, some market research and a little speculation on who you're targeting, who they're targeting, and where the money ultimately comes from. I know you're a great fan of working to the lowest common denominator and running on 1+ billion ancient Java phones running MIDP spec JVMs, but you may need to completely rethink that model in the light of the flow of cash through the particular ecosystem you're looking at. My thoughts on the matter have run thusly (directly the opposite end to your thinking, I am aware, but bear with me):

1+ billion crappy phones are out there, but, the vast majority of these phones are sold into economies where a) everybody is seriously broke as a broke thing compared to us decadent Western types and b) as a result of this they tend to have rather relaxed attitudes to obtaining software in exchange for money. Rapidly 1 billion phones becomes a mere million phones belonging to the kind of people that actually pay for software (yes, seriously: even on the desktop we only have a 1% conversion rate). Of that million phones, how many people want to play games? How do you even reach those people? They're in places that are hard to reach in the first place.

So that's the people at the bottom of the ecosystem you're looking at: a million people in the whole world who might be willing to pay for software and who actually have the money to do so. Total speculation about the %ages but you can bet it's not even vaguely close to 100% of 1 billion.

Those million people are therefore the target for developers for whom you are targeting your software library stuff. They're already pretty well served by MIDP anyway, and most of 'em, like myself, prefer to roll our own code to do the things we want anyway as we have a fairly clear understanding of the problem domains in which we move. My own sprite engine stuff for example isn't much use to mostly anyone else except as a curiosity as it's heavily geared to doing things exactly the way I like to do things (the whole toolchain from start to end). This is why I've not used libgdx and so on - it doesn't fit how we do stuff.

Each developer you're targeting with your library is fighting for a slice of the game pie amongst those million potential customers. Most of those developers are therefore themselves 3rd worlders - and just as broke as everyone else - or at least competing with people who work for virtually nothing - for a vanishingly small slice of that pie. Imagine that 1 million potential customers is enough to financially support one developer who can sell 1,000 games for a buck every few months. That's a yearly salary of $3-4k maybe, of which they might reasonably consider investing a small percentage in tools and libraries. No western programmers are going to live off of that kind of money, which is why no western programmers are targeting this market.

In the west there are two platforms you develop for: iOS, where the vast bulk of the money lies, albeit behind a massive iron curtain; and Android, where the remaining crumbs live. iOS has multiple massive advantages over every other platform: it's got almost no piracy to speak of relative to any other platform out there; it's got a slick, tightly coupled software vending route; and the people that own iOS devices are rich and like spending money. They have to be rich and like spending money because iPhones and iPads are bloody expensive in the first place.

Android is more of a sprawling mess, with stuff at the bottom end being literally a tenth the power of stuff at the top end. The sales platform is weaker but less regulated. The cost of the hardware to the consumer varies by a factor of 5 across the whole spectrum of what's out there, from $100 to $500, which means you've got a wide variation from skinflints to rich people who wanted to be different. This means that a fairly large proportion of Android customers are tightwads and don't want to spend money on things in the first place, and even then, they can quite easily spend money on something a bit crap.

Myself I'm only targeting Android because I'm too dim to get to grips with C++ and iOS yet. I'm trying to figure out whether it's best to target the skinflints and crap phones to increase breadth of potential or whether it's worth simply targeting the rich people at the top and get a much higher conversion rate. Purely from a technical perspective the latter is vastly easier for me, and may in the end bring in the same amount of money, which will still be literally a tenth of what iOS might bring in with precisely the same product.

So with that in mind: is your library actually worth anything to anyone who is likely to be using it and if it is worth anything, how much money are they likely to want to spend on it given that they themselves are probably not making much money?

Or: when was the last time you heard of someone writing a MIDP phone application that made the author a million dollars? Someone manages that every week on iOS.

Some more concrete feedback on the site: dark blue and red do not go together like that (on your game index), flashing colored text and marquees are distracting and hard to read, and animated gifs are not very classy, especially when they are pixelated.

I couldn't even figure out there were even any games on the site til someone pointed me to the list. Thus why I thought it was some kind of ecommerce platform. I understand English isn't everyone's first language, but if you're going to do your site in English, hire a native speaker.

I couldn't even figure out there were even any games on the site til someone pointed me to the list. Thus why I thought it was some kind of ecommerce platform. I understand English isn't everyone's first language, but if you're going to do your site in English, hire a native speaker.

Based on comments by lhkbob and Cas I have decided that my original belief was true. I guess I am just dreaming when it comes to the possibility of getting large corporate or other investment.

That is to say Borland and other tool companies go out of business for a reason. People will not pay for tools very often unless you control the whole ecosystem.

As such I will sell the AllBinary Platform with my games on a custom Raspberry Pi a few weeks after I get one at cost plus shipping. I guess the light I see at the end of the tunnel will still take 3 years regardless. At least it is getting closer fast (It was just really far far away).

This does not mean that I will ignore support for J2ME, Android, J2SE, iOS, Native, AS3/Flash/Air, or HTML5. It just means I will have my own custom game console based on semi open hardware.

Conclusion: Keep my head down and sell a low budget game console.

Note to Cas: BlackBerry actually has a rich user base. As a percentage of market ownership I actually sell more games on BB. From time to time they even edge out IPhone on income depending on the study. Probably because they still have jobs

Blackberry's an interesting little niche to be sure (so's Symbian and WP7) but anecdotal evidence from people I know in the game tells me the ratio of money to platforms goes something like 100:10:1 for iOS:Android:Everything Else. It would also seem that Blackberry is seriously losing market share. Actually everyone is losing market share, even iOS, to Android. It's the Windows of the phone world - a bit cranky and slightly shit in various ways, steals everyones ideas and IP, but available on all manner of hardware to hundreds of manufacturers... it really is PC/Windows versus proprietary/Apple all over again!

Also - it's quite hard to tell who is and who isn't an English speaker natively on these boards You'd be surprised...

Total digression - there are a lot of odd preconceptions about other people on forums and generally based on a lot of odd things. A lot of people think I'm black having never met me because of my name. It's sad to say but in this country that is likely to have cost me a lot of job interviews (I must say I did get suspiciously few interviews over the last few years compared to the number of roles I applied for). Nice to see racism is alive and well in the UK, hmm.

Also...I've been thinking about low-budget games consoles for years, powered exclusively by Java. The hardware and OS is all in place now, just needs someone to get it together. RPi is unfortunately a bit too weedy and low budget though. It did occur to my my phone has pretty awesome hardware in it, hobbled only by the extremely crap JVM. But then, I did actually have a go with Sunacle's official J2SE 6 for ARM and it was blazingly fast. Hmm again.

Pointing out that the text on your site comes across like English isn't your first language is hardly being a troll! You should take note. Spelling and grammar mistakes can lose you a lot of interest. We sometimes get a specialist to help our web clients with copy - if it's not your strong point, then get someone to help - it's worth it!

Along with the design of your site, the copyright 2005 doesn't help make it look current either! At least put 2011 in for now.

Pointing out that the text on your site comes across like English isn't your first language is hardly being a troll! You should take note. Spelling and grammar mistakes can lose you a lot of interest. We sometimes get a specialist to help our web clients with copy - if it's not your strong point, then get someone to help - it's worth it!

Along with the design of your site, the copyright 2005 doesn't help make it look current either! At least put 2011 in for now.

I don't think it has more errors than most sites. In fact I think it may not have spelling errors. Also I made most of it in 2003 and I have not made a template update to it since about 2005 as such the copyright is actually correct.

It has nothing to do with my current profit. As such I will not update it until I make some money. I will probably update it in a few years.

if you mean http://tuer.sourceforge.net/, then no. You are doing so little, you can do little wrongbut obviously a default black text on white is much better then red and blue. which is like the worst you can do =Pand the TUER page is so simple, that you definitely find what you are looking for ^^

I don't think it has more errors than most sites. In fact I think it may not have spelling errors.

Quote

You can start excepting online payments immediately

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We strive to provide the best sofware development with a focus on...

And of course 'the best software development' makes no gramatical sense either. That's three obvious mistakes on the first two paragraphs of your front page. Clicking on a few random other pages I spotted several other similar mistakes so it definitely needs a good proof read.

And the rest of the problems already mentioned. I agree with Z-Man it looks like a spam site - probably mostly due to the link styling that looks like a bad token replace, and the over-zealous use of (tm) everywhere. Getting all defensive isn't going to help matters either.

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